A friend of mine called this morning with a few questions regarding President Trump’s low approval ratings in the latest polls. If only 2 percent of Trump supporters say they regret having voted for him, the guy asked, how can it be that 40 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance as president? His meager approval numbers suggest that more people would be sorry that they ever supported him in the first place, wouldn’t they? Good questions. And here are the answers: For starters, Trump won in the Electoral College,...

To hear some people tell it, the major national political polls missed the mark so badly in the November presidential election that their continued existence should be called into question. The truth of the matter is that the final national numbers posted by most of the big polls were pretty close to the actual results — well within the pollsters’ stated margins of error. To wit, the last of the major pre-election polls foresaw, on average, that Hillary Clinton would carry the national popular vote by about 3 percentage...

In a post published here the other day, I faulted Donald Trump for whining that polls that produce results that don’t favor him are “rigged.” I argued that The Donald apparently doesn’t understand the scientific efforts that go into reliable polling. Well, today I’m here to concede that some polls — too many of them, actually — are unscientific and consequently are worthless. These polls aren’t rigged, at least not in the sense that Trump implies, but they’re highly misleading....

President-elect Donald Trump’s says that polls showing his approval ratings at historically low levels as his inauguration draws near should be taken with a big grain of salt. . “The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls, Trump said today. “They are rigged just like before.” . The problem with that analysis is that there’s little or no evidence to support it. Trump, like so many other Americans, simply doesn’t understand the science of polling....

When it comes to political polling, the first thing you need to know is that any survey that doesn’t follow the fundamental scientific rules of the game is mostly worthless. Reputable polling organizations take great pains to follow those rules, which is why their results usually are pretty much similar to one another. If Gallup has a poll showing Smith leading Jones by nine percentage points, most other reliable polls likely will show similar results. Sometimes, however, a pollster with a good reputation will come up with...